The best Hacker News stories from Show from the past day
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Show HN: Will I run Boston 2025?
Show HN: Selectric – macOS Search for Gmail, Outlook, Drive, Slack
I got frustrated with Outlook, Gmail and Google drive search never being able to find anything in my Inbox or Cloud storage and decided to build a personal email and document search that works better.<p>Selectric is a free MacOS app and currently supports Gmail, Outlook, Drive, Dropbox and Slack. The app is completely private. We index and store all data on your Mac. We also run AI models locally so no data ever needs to leave your computer.<p>I'd love for the HN community to try us out and share feedback!
Show HN: Sol – A de-minifier for shell programs
I've built a tool called sol (like "soul") that helps you inspect and format complex shell one-liners. Features:<p>- Choose which transformations you want (break on pipe, args, redirect, whatever)<p>- "Peeks" into stringified commands (think xargs, parallel) and formats those, too<p>- Auto-breaks at a given width (e.g., 80 characters)<p>- Shows you non-standard aliases, functions, files, etc. that you might not have in your shell environment<p>- Breaks up long jq lines with jqfmt because—let's be honest—they're getting out of hand<p>As a security researcher and tool developer, I often encounter (or create) long pipelined Bash commands. While quick and powerful, they can be a nightmare to read or debug. I created sol to make it easier to understand and share these commands with others.
Show HN: Sol – A de-minifier for shell programs
I've built a tool called sol (like "soul") that helps you inspect and format complex shell one-liners. Features:<p>- Choose which transformations you want (break on pipe, args, redirect, whatever)<p>- "Peeks" into stringified commands (think xargs, parallel) and formats those, too<p>- Auto-breaks at a given width (e.g., 80 characters)<p>- Shows you non-standard aliases, functions, files, etc. that you might not have in your shell environment<p>- Breaks up long jq lines with jqfmt because—let's be honest—they're getting out of hand<p>As a security researcher and tool developer, I often encounter (or create) long pipelined Bash commands. While quick and powerful, they can be a nightmare to read or debug. I created sol to make it easier to understand and share these commands with others.
Show HN: Sol – A de-minifier for shell programs
I've built a tool called sol (like "soul") that helps you inspect and format complex shell one-liners. Features:<p>- Choose which transformations you want (break on pipe, args, redirect, whatever)<p>- "Peeks" into stringified commands (think xargs, parallel) and formats those, too<p>- Auto-breaks at a given width (e.g., 80 characters)<p>- Shows you non-standard aliases, functions, files, etc. that you might not have in your shell environment<p>- Breaks up long jq lines with jqfmt because—let's be honest—they're getting out of hand<p>As a security researcher and tool developer, I often encounter (or create) long pipelined Bash commands. While quick and powerful, they can be a nightmare to read or debug. I created sol to make it easier to understand and share these commands with others.
Show HN: I've Built an Accounting System
It can create invoices and receive payments.<p>Not quite production ready, yet.<p>Only need PostgreSQL installed to try.<p>I will add support to choose SQLite when they add native support for geography types.
Show HN: I've Built an Accounting System
It can create invoices and receive payments.<p>Not quite production ready, yet.<p>Only need PostgreSQL installed to try.<p>I will add support to choose SQLite when they add native support for geography types.
Show HN: I've Built an Accounting System
It can create invoices and receive payments.<p>Not quite production ready, yet.<p>Only need PostgreSQL installed to try.<p>I will add support to choose SQLite when they add native support for geography types.
Show HN: I've Built an Accounting System
It can create invoices and receive payments.<p>Not quite production ready, yet.<p>Only need PostgreSQL installed to try.<p>I will add support to choose SQLite when they add native support for geography types.
Show HN: I've Built an Accounting System
It can create invoices and receive payments.<p>Not quite production ready, yet.<p>Only need PostgreSQL installed to try.<p>I will add support to choose SQLite when they add native support for geography types.
Show HN: I've Built an Accounting System
It can create invoices and receive payments.<p>Not quite production ready, yet.<p>Only need PostgreSQL installed to try.<p>I will add support to choose SQLite when they add native support for geography types.
Show HN: I made crowdwave – imagine Twitter/Reddit but every post is a voicemail
Hey it's Andrew - author of <a href="https://www.crowdwave.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.crowdwave.com</a> here!<p>- crowdwave works best on your phone - unless you've got your headset and microphone plugged in to your desktop, in which case desktop works great too.<p>Here's the story:<p>So about six months ago I saw this post on HN <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39910119">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39910119</a><p><a href="https://afterthebeep.tel" rel="nofollow">https://afterthebeep.tel</a> is really cool - it's an anonymous voicemail box - you call the provided phone the number and leave a message. Blaine - the guy who runs the site (eventually) listens to and approves your message and writes a headline. It was fun, and I found I kept going back to it and listening to the messages. I left a message once and several weeks later it appeared on the site. Blaine, from comments I read, didn't seem in a hurry to take the site much further, which got me thinking...<p>And I simply could not get one question out of my head - "what would happen if users could just hit record on their phone, instead of having to dial a phone number?".<p>When I get a software idea I get pretty obsessive and that question just kept gnawing at me.<p>So, like the any reasonable programmer would, I stopped working on the project I had been working on for literally YEARS and took a detour. Because that's what you do isn't it - you just drop those multiple years of work and pick up the shiny new thing.<p>I saw that afterthebeep is open source and I loved the UI design - the Windows 3.1 aesthetic really appealed to me - it seems perfect for voicemail, so I grabbed the open source code and started development. I couldn't make much sense of the code - it was using tech I'm not familiar with, so I ditched it all except the layout and the graphics.<p>Fortunately, the project I had been working on for YEARS is basically a Twitter/Reddit clone, so I ripped the UI out of the afterthebeep open source project and did open heart surgery until like some bizarre Frankenstein's monster I had put the afterthebeep open source UI onto my code.<p>And I added in the functionality that I craved so much - a "record" button. Sigh.... relief. It was incredibly satisfying to hit record and see a message appear almost immediately. Nerd craving fulfilled.<p>But my satisfaction did not last long. I REALLY HAD TO fix that problem of getting the posts approved and headlines written. So I made a back end audio processing pipeline and fed the messages into an LLM, which ripped the text from the speech and I then shoved it into OpenAI and asked it to make nice headlines. And it worked beautifully - now you only have to wait 30 seconds to see your message with a nice headline! Ahhhh..... sigh, satisfaction... (it wouldn't be 2024 without an AI twist, would it now?).<p>But hang on! It would be <i>SO much better</i> if there was some sort of category system almost like subreddits - then people could post their messages into areas of interest. So I built the channel system and sat back.... job done.<p>Looking at the calendar, dreading to see..... I've dropped into obsessive coding mode and and I've been down this rabbit hole full time for MONTHS. I'm getting wary - and I'm also getting tired and sick of the effort - when's this going to end?<p>But wait, another idea! How much more cool would it be if you could have your own user account, and follow and like and subscribe! I've just GOT TO make that. AND surely it has to be multi language doesn't it? I mean Germans like talking too don't they? And user profile pics, and channel banner images, and options and settings. And if you don't put in terms and conditions and privacy and a cookie message then won't the Eurpoeans turn up and arrest me? At this stage I'm like a drunken junkie wanting just one more thing, one more thing...... scope ain't just creeping, the scope is up and racing away faster than Usain Bolt.<p>I'm now like nearly five months into this and packing all this functionality into a UI that both make sense and fits onto a tiny phone screen is becoming a huge challenge - a challenge I don't know if I can actually solve - and if I can't make the UI make sense then the whole thing will be unusable. The UI MUST be minimal and yet still reveal to the user pretty much everything within fewer than five pages in total. The UI had to work BEST on a phone. That was a HUGE challenge, and I really didn't know until the end of the project if I could do it at all. But finally the UI seemed to come together and it was a tight squeeze but fit onto the limited screen resolution of even my old iPhone 6s (yes it's my main phone).<p>Then, a few days ago, after many months of grueling grind, there was nothing left on the todo list. crowdwave was done! All the features were done and I'd finally chased down that scope creep.<p>Which brings us to today. Give <a href="https://www.crowdwave.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.crowdwave.com</a> a go on your phone or desktop if you have microphone. It's brand new so there WILL be bugs - hopefully not too severe. Thanks to Blaine at <a href="https://blaines.world/" rel="nofollow">https://blaines.world/</a> for the inspiration!
Show HN: I made crowdwave – imagine Twitter/Reddit but every post is a voicemail
Hey it's Andrew - author of <a href="https://www.crowdwave.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.crowdwave.com</a> here!<p>- crowdwave works best on your phone - unless you've got your headset and microphone plugged in to your desktop, in which case desktop works great too.<p>Here's the story:<p>So about six months ago I saw this post on HN <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39910119">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39910119</a><p><a href="https://afterthebeep.tel" rel="nofollow">https://afterthebeep.tel</a> is really cool - it's an anonymous voicemail box - you call the provided phone the number and leave a message. Blaine - the guy who runs the site (eventually) listens to and approves your message and writes a headline. It was fun, and I found I kept going back to it and listening to the messages. I left a message once and several weeks later it appeared on the site. Blaine, from comments I read, didn't seem in a hurry to take the site much further, which got me thinking...<p>And I simply could not get one question out of my head - "what would happen if users could just hit record on their phone, instead of having to dial a phone number?".<p>When I get a software idea I get pretty obsessive and that question just kept gnawing at me.<p>So, like the any reasonable programmer would, I stopped working on the project I had been working on for literally YEARS and took a detour. Because that's what you do isn't it - you just drop those multiple years of work and pick up the shiny new thing.<p>I saw that afterthebeep is open source and I loved the UI design - the Windows 3.1 aesthetic really appealed to me - it seems perfect for voicemail, so I grabbed the open source code and started development. I couldn't make much sense of the code - it was using tech I'm not familiar with, so I ditched it all except the layout and the graphics.<p>Fortunately, the project I had been working on for YEARS is basically a Twitter/Reddit clone, so I ripped the UI out of the afterthebeep open source project and did open heart surgery until like some bizarre Frankenstein's monster I had put the afterthebeep open source UI onto my code.<p>And I added in the functionality that I craved so much - a "record" button. Sigh.... relief. It was incredibly satisfying to hit record and see a message appear almost immediately. Nerd craving fulfilled.<p>But my satisfaction did not last long. I REALLY HAD TO fix that problem of getting the posts approved and headlines written. So I made a back end audio processing pipeline and fed the messages into an LLM, which ripped the text from the speech and I then shoved it into OpenAI and asked it to make nice headlines. And it worked beautifully - now you only have to wait 30 seconds to see your message with a nice headline! Ahhhh..... sigh, satisfaction... (it wouldn't be 2024 without an AI twist, would it now?).<p>But hang on! It would be <i>SO much better</i> if there was some sort of category system almost like subreddits - then people could post their messages into areas of interest. So I built the channel system and sat back.... job done.<p>Looking at the calendar, dreading to see..... I've dropped into obsessive coding mode and and I've been down this rabbit hole full time for MONTHS. I'm getting wary - and I'm also getting tired and sick of the effort - when's this going to end?<p>But wait, another idea! How much more cool would it be if you could have your own user account, and follow and like and subscribe! I've just GOT TO make that. AND surely it has to be multi language doesn't it? I mean Germans like talking too don't they? And user profile pics, and channel banner images, and options and settings. And if you don't put in terms and conditions and privacy and a cookie message then won't the Eurpoeans turn up and arrest me? At this stage I'm like a drunken junkie wanting just one more thing, one more thing...... scope ain't just creeping, the scope is up and racing away faster than Usain Bolt.<p>I'm now like nearly five months into this and packing all this functionality into a UI that both make sense and fits onto a tiny phone screen is becoming a huge challenge - a challenge I don't know if I can actually solve - and if I can't make the UI make sense then the whole thing will be unusable. The UI MUST be minimal and yet still reveal to the user pretty much everything within fewer than five pages in total. The UI had to work BEST on a phone. That was a HUGE challenge, and I really didn't know until the end of the project if I could do it at all. But finally the UI seemed to come together and it was a tight squeeze but fit onto the limited screen resolution of even my old iPhone 6s (yes it's my main phone).<p>Then, a few days ago, after many months of grueling grind, there was nothing left on the todo list. crowdwave was done! All the features were done and I'd finally chased down that scope creep.<p>Which brings us to today. Give <a href="https://www.crowdwave.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.crowdwave.com</a> a go on your phone or desktop if you have microphone. It's brand new so there WILL be bugs - hopefully not too severe. Thanks to Blaine at <a href="https://blaines.world/" rel="nofollow">https://blaines.world/</a> for the inspiration!
Show HN: Opik, an open source LLM evaluation framework
Hey HN! I'm Caleb, one of the contributors to Opik, a new open source framework for LLM evaluations.<p>Over the last few months, my colleagues and I have been working on a project to solve what we see as the most painful parts of writing evals for an LLM application. For this initial release, we've focused on a few core features that we think are the most essential:<p>- Simplifying the implementation of more complex LLM-based evaluation metrics, like Hallucination and Moderation.<p>- Enabling step-by-step tracking, such that you can test and debug each individual component of your LLM application, even in more complex multi-agent architectures.<p>- Exposing an API for "model unit tests" (built on Pytest), to allow you to run evals as part of your CI/CD pipelines<p>- Providing an easy UI for scoring, annotating, and versioning your logged LLM data, for further evaluation or training.<p>It's often hard to feel like you can trust an LLM application in production, not just because of the stochastic nature of the model, but because of the opaqueness of the application itself. Our belief is that with better tooling for evaluations, we can meaningfully improve this situation, and unlock a new wave of LLM applications.<p>You can run Opik locally, or with a free API key via our cloud platform. You can use it with any model server or hosted model, but we currently have a built-in integration with the OpenAI Python library, which means it automatically works not just with OpenAI models, but with any model served via a compatible model server (ollama, vLLM, etc). Opik also currently has out-of-the-box integrations with LangChain, LlamaIndex, Ragas, and a few other popular tools.<p>This is our initial release of Opik, so if you have any feedback or questions, I'd love to hear them!
Show HN: Opik, an open source LLM evaluation framework
Hey HN! I'm Caleb, one of the contributors to Opik, a new open source framework for LLM evaluations.<p>Over the last few months, my colleagues and I have been working on a project to solve what we see as the most painful parts of writing evals for an LLM application. For this initial release, we've focused on a few core features that we think are the most essential:<p>- Simplifying the implementation of more complex LLM-based evaluation metrics, like Hallucination and Moderation.<p>- Enabling step-by-step tracking, such that you can test and debug each individual component of your LLM application, even in more complex multi-agent architectures.<p>- Exposing an API for "model unit tests" (built on Pytest), to allow you to run evals as part of your CI/CD pipelines<p>- Providing an easy UI for scoring, annotating, and versioning your logged LLM data, for further evaluation or training.<p>It's often hard to feel like you can trust an LLM application in production, not just because of the stochastic nature of the model, but because of the opaqueness of the application itself. Our belief is that with better tooling for evaluations, we can meaningfully improve this situation, and unlock a new wave of LLM applications.<p>You can run Opik locally, or with a free API key via our cloud platform. You can use it with any model server or hosted model, but we currently have a built-in integration with the OpenAI Python library, which means it automatically works not just with OpenAI models, but with any model served via a compatible model server (ollama, vLLM, etc). Opik also currently has out-of-the-box integrations with LangChain, LlamaIndex, Ragas, and a few other popular tools.<p>This is our initial release of Opik, so if you have any feedback or questions, I'd love to hear them!
Show HN: Franzelio – Draw lines, make music, share your instrument
Show HN: Franzelio – Draw lines, make music, share your instrument
Show HN: Finic – Open source platform for building browser automations
Last year we launched a project called Psychic that did moderately well on hacker news, but was a commercial failure. We were able to find customers, but none with compelling and overlapping use cases. Everyone who was interested was too early to be a real customer.<p>This was our launch: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36032081">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36032081</a><p>We recently decided to revive and rebrand the project after seeing a sudden spike in interest from people who wanted to connect LLMs to data - but specifically through browsers. It's also a problem we've experienced firsthand, having built scraping features into Psychic and previously working on bot detection at Robinhood.<p>If you haven’t built a web scraper or browser automation before, you might assume it’s very straightforward. People have been building scrapers for as long as the internet has existed, so there must be many tools for the job.<p>The truth is that web scraping strategies need to constantly adapt as web standard change, and as companies that don’t want to be scraped adopt new technologies to try and block it. The old standards never completely go away, so the longer the internet exists, the more edge cases you’ll need to account for. This adds up to a LOT of infrastructure that needs to be set up and a lot of schlep developers have to go through to get up and running.<p>Scraping is no easier today than it was 10 years ago - the problems are just different.<p>Finic is an open source platform for building and deploying browser agents. Browser agents are bots deployed to the cloud that mimic the behaviour of humans, like web scrapers or remote process automation (RPA) jobs. Simple examples include scripts that scrape static websites like the SEC's EDGAR database. More complex use cases include integrating with legacy applications that don’t have public APIs, where the best way to automate data entry is to just manipulate HTML selectors (EHRs for example).<p>Our goal is to make Finic the easiest way to deploy a Playwright-based browser automation. With this launch, you can already do so in just 4 steps. Check out our docs for more info: <a href="https://docs.finic.io/quickstart" rel="nofollow">https://docs.finic.io/quickstart</a>
Show HN: Finic – Open source platform for building browser automations
Last year we launched a project called Psychic that did moderately well on hacker news, but was a commercial failure. We were able to find customers, but none with compelling and overlapping use cases. Everyone who was interested was too early to be a real customer.<p>This was our launch: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36032081">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36032081</a><p>We recently decided to revive and rebrand the project after seeing a sudden spike in interest from people who wanted to connect LLMs to data - but specifically through browsers. It's also a problem we've experienced firsthand, having built scraping features into Psychic and previously working on bot detection at Robinhood.<p>If you haven’t built a web scraper or browser automation before, you might assume it’s very straightforward. People have been building scrapers for as long as the internet has existed, so there must be many tools for the job.<p>The truth is that web scraping strategies need to constantly adapt as web standard change, and as companies that don’t want to be scraped adopt new technologies to try and block it. The old standards never completely go away, so the longer the internet exists, the more edge cases you’ll need to account for. This adds up to a LOT of infrastructure that needs to be set up and a lot of schlep developers have to go through to get up and running.<p>Scraping is no easier today than it was 10 years ago - the problems are just different.<p>Finic is an open source platform for building and deploying browser agents. Browser agents are bots deployed to the cloud that mimic the behaviour of humans, like web scrapers or remote process automation (RPA) jobs. Simple examples include scripts that scrape static websites like the SEC's EDGAR database. More complex use cases include integrating with legacy applications that don’t have public APIs, where the best way to automate data entry is to just manipulate HTML selectors (EHRs for example).<p>Our goal is to make Finic the easiest way to deploy a Playwright-based browser automation. With this launch, you can already do so in just 4 steps. Check out our docs for more info: <a href="https://docs.finic.io/quickstart" rel="nofollow">https://docs.finic.io/quickstart</a>
Show HN: Electrico – Electron Without Node and Chrome